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Something changed in the already-flaky conference wireless system, and I haven't been able to get online from the conference (only from my hotel room) for a while. That has limited my ability to update. But here goes.

September 7, Wednesday: day 2 of MOL 12, notably including the guided
walking tour of tourist sites around Nara. I had mixed feelings about that:
I got a lot of interesting information from the tour and visited some places
I might not have done under my own power, but it was also at times
frustrating.

Okay, the update for September 7 probably will take a while, because there are a lot of pictures and things to describe - that was the day of the conference-sponsored walking tour. However, I did look up the unknown Shinto shrine with the sign saying 「えんむすび采女神社」 shown in the photo gallery, so here's a quick note about that.

These are mostly collected for my own reference, so that I can quickly find them during my trip, but they may be of interest to readers as well. Inclusion of a site on this list (or on the linked maps) doesn't necessarily mean that I will visit it - some I'm just recording for reference, and my itinerary will be at least partly decided spur-of-the-moment. See also my earlier posting. I will probably continue updating this entry rather than writing new entries for additional links; but reports when I'm actually on my trip will go in new entries.

In September I'm going to Japan for three weeks, and one of the things I'm planning to do there is visit Shinto shrines. Here are some links on that, which may be of interest to Western pagans among my readers.

I hope to push the first release of Tsukurimashou out the door tomorrow, and as part of that, I was looking at the possibility of adding optical sizes to it. That won't happen in tomorrow's release, but it will happen eventually, and the train of thought led from there to a thing I once saw in an historical mail-order catalog: an entire multi-page selection of Christian Bibles, organized by different optional features, such as type size, paper and binding quality, and so on. It occurred to me to look on the Net for the current state of the art in such things, and that led me to this site, which is fascinating. It's an entire Web log about the design of Bibles.

Wondermark 700 raises the question of which dollar you're withdrawing when you withdraw a dollar from a bank account. Is it first-in first-out like a queue? Is it last-in first-out like a stack? One character in the strip says the question is silly and meaningless, but I'm not so sure; and I think the correct answer is neither stack nor queue.

It's not so easy to find a primitive, backward culture anymore. Satellite
constellations can lay down a gigahertz on every square kilometer of the
Earth's surface and where there's a signal there will be receivers. We need
not even mention the orbitals. The painters may be naked - they may be
using mud pigments and hair brushes. You might mistake them for a tiny
group of prehistoric people somehow cut off from the march of progress for
thousands of years. That would be a mistake. Machines dug this cave, the
hair for the brushes was grown by bacteria in a bottle, and the design
taking shape on the wall does not represent an animal to be hunted. Not
exactly.